Reading ghost stories, at the Winter Solstice: Oliphant, Wharton, M.R. James

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93) A lady in a garden by moonlight (1882)

From BBC film adaptation of M. R. James’s The Ash Tree, 1975

Dear friends and readers,

This Christmas I revived on all three of my list-servs reading and discussion of Christmas ghost stories — or, failing ghosts (the case of Anthony Trollope, too strong a sceptic for this kind of thing), just stories meant for Christmas (we read “Christmas at Thompson Hall”). It is a long custom-sanction’d habit to tell ghost stories at the Winter Solstice, and I’d read some with others a few years ago for a couple of years in a row, and made a gothic section on my website for some of our conversations (see. e.g., Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Lost Ghost”). On two lists people read with me, and on a third a couple of people watched the YouTube presentations I had found.

So, on the evening of this (fulfilling as it happened) Christmas Day I thought I’d re-tell one, offer a brief synopsis and YouTube of another, some links to powerful ones and an explanation from whence this urge to tell ghost stories Winter Solstice derives.

I found myself reading a-new, finding new qualities in Margaret Oliphant’s “Old Lady Mary.” Oliphant’s most powerful fiction is a ghost novella, The Beleaguered City, where, as in “Old Lady Mary,” part of the power of the story comes from the desire of the dead beloved and loving person to reach one another, in response to a shared loss and loneliness.

19th century illustration of Beleaguered City

The story as I first understood it (here’s the online text):

In brief: a very old lady, ‘Old Lady Mary’, who is very rich and alone, takes the daughter of a distant cousin, nearly a child, without anyone else to turn to, into her house. She is all that can be loving and tender and good to the child as she brings her up. She is told that she must make a will out which will leave her money to young Mary, but cannot get herself to do it. She cannot face the reality she will die, has always herself been because of her wealth sheltered. Lady Mary resents advice, and avoids the lawyers by playfulness. She does however write a codicil, leaving everything to the girl, but she hides it away.

She dies, and the young girl is left desolate.

This begins the story which then takes us through the young girl’s fear, loss, humiliations at the hands of the family who takes over Lady Mary, her guardian’s house — they don’t mean to hurt her, but they put her in her place. She is now their servant. At the very end of the story we are told it was finally found, but that is in a coda and is not important.

The story is told from the point of view of Old Lady Mary after she has died — when she is a ghost, trying to make contact and reparation, retrieval is too late. Her presence is felt but the living act towards her frivolously, foolishly. Ghosts make them uncomfortable. The story is aimed at Dickens’s Christmas Carol, by then an iconic story where all can be undone, retrieved, redeemed. Not so, says Oliphant. Less seriously, she has some fun gently mocking the way ghosts are treated in stories.

The curious effect is to make us believe in Lady Mary as a ghost; to take her seriously. This is no silly story for people who want titillation or reassurance.

These are certainly besides the point to Lady Mary who is desperate to make contact with the young Mary. But, she supposes that she wants more than emotional catharsis, forgiveness, and release. She wants to help her. (Think Tiny Tim.) She wants more than to compensate; she wants to retrieve, to make up for past mistakes, and finds she cannot make genuine contact. She
has convinced herself her attempts her unselfish because there’s the codicil to be found and then the young Mary will own the house where she is now a servant. But ghosts are laughed at or make people nervous. Their paraphernalia is absurd.

The climax of the story is in a obscure but precisely described vision of the young girl. From all her troubles and the disquiet and upset brought on by Lady Mary’s efforts, the young Mary grows ill, and, as in a dream, for a split second sees Lady Mary who feels she is seen. In that moment the girl holds out her hand and Lady Mary feels she has been forgiven. After all she discovers she needs no nothing more. That’s it. We get a sense the young Mary and the old Lady Mary were face to face. But we are not sure. It might just be in the ghost’s mind. Young Mary never fully explains what she feels because people would laugh, and she’s not sure what she saw though she did from the beginning forgive & never hated her ex-guardian. She was taught by the old lady not to expect much.

The last enigmatic line of the story: ‘Everything is included in pardon and love’.

Re-reading: I was more than ever persuaded Oliphant had Dickens’s one benign and perhaps other Christmas season texts in mind where all is made up for in a gush of end-of-story forgive and forgetfulness (modern term “Healing”). But I felt this time that Old Lady Mary however stumblingly and ambiguously did retrieve the situation and felt she reached the young girl she now realized she had loved so.

She does not get to reach out to young Mary directly, cannot have the satisfaction for sure which she is reaching out for soon after the tale opens. In life she could have made sure young Mary understood she was sorry for how she had behaved in life, what she had done in death, but still we are told the old woman managed to reach someone and point to where the will was and the will is found. The understanding and forgiveness are left ambiguous. We do not know for sure that the girl got the money she so desperately needed, but enough is put before us to assume so. How life-like.

I realized how much it’s a heroine’s text. Much of the story is spent in Lady Mary as a ghost’s mind and that is very unusual. I want to stress that. I dare say almost all ghost stories, we are not permitted to get close to the ghost. They are kept at a distance. Again, they are mostly scary, malevolent, Kafka-esque figures. The intensely benign aim of ghost Lady Mary’s efforts is as rare as Dickens, but with Dickens we do not enter the ghost’s consciousness. And show the ghost failing to reach.

Her story in this way shows belief in an afterlife and ghosts around us. The ambiguous wispy signals of seances you see are ghosts trying to reach us and unable to as God has made it too late. I think we may take it that this is how Oliphant understood the absurdity of what happens at seances. My outstanding favorite line from Downton Abbey is the Scots housekeeper’s retort to the lady’s maid’s conventional appeal,

“Don’t you believe in spirits?”
“I do not believe they play boardgames.”

By contrast, Oliphant has it, it’s that God will not let the dead reach us. She was a firm believer in the afterlife. I should stress that. These are not the kinds of ghost stories where the story is strictly speaking a metaphor. In Oliphant’s case her husband, both sons, nephew and a niece all pre-deceased her. To believe they carried on elsewhere was apparently one way she could endure her raw grief and continual sense of desperate loss.

I found it a much more moving story than I did the first time round.

Michelle Dockery could play the part of young Mary very well. Now known for her part as Lady Mary Grantham in Downton Abbey, she was much better as the unnamed governess in Sandy Welch’s 2009 Turn of the Screw)

**************

BBC film adaptation of “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedrale” by M.R. James

It should be said most ghost stories are instances of female gothic, many have been written by women, and they are often ways of presenting the real vampirage over women by men and societies in general. This was a speciality of Edith Wharton whose “Kerfol” I reread last week. The writer need not be a woman, and the vulnerable figure can be a man (as they just about all are in M.R. James’s stories (“The Stalls”). But the one I read from 3 I chose by M.R. James all set in the 18th century was such a story, and gentle reader here it is online and as a YouTube

The film features a very young Edward Petherbridge, and with his and other actors’ help, the BBC group has brought out the terror and power and high violence of an MRJames story usually there, but in muted subjective form. The film version brings out the terror and horror. It’s the story of an 18th century squire-aristocrat who has returned to his estate and country house is haunted by the ghosts of women beaten, tortured and then hung as witches and that this is who the ghosts are that destroy him by their hideous tales only emerges slowly.

What I like particularly about the whole of this early series from the BBC is instead of the usual prettied up 18thcentury (say of faithful Austen films) we see the raw realities of rural life. It’s not a story for the weak stomached if you can get it up to full screen.

******************

From the cover of an anthology of ghost stories by women written at the turn of the 19th into 20th century: Restless Spirits

Gentle reader, it’s not hard to find potted explanations of the origin of ghost stories as matter for Christmas. But it’s often-half-hearted. How did this habit emerge?

I’ve a different explanation than most I’ve seen. This festival comes at the end of each year. Says John Donne: “‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s …” It’s natural to look back, to remember, indeed that’s one of the functions of this ritual time. And in many years of our lives, we lose people. Before the 20th century death was ubiquitous for young and old. This year my mother died. I was first drawn to ghost stories after my fathere died, irretrievably gone, and I could not make up wrongs that had happened. Psychologically I would feel his presence in my mind lurking.

This year I found myself remembering more cheerfully a good friend I met here on the Internet, who joined in various reads, who discussed, and who I was lucky enough on one fine night to spend an evening in Brooklyn with at a party with two of her close friends, Linda Ribas. She died in summer, too young to have left us. She read some of these stories with us on WWTTA, Henry James on Trollope19thCStudies, an 18th century novel by a woman on EighteenthCenturyWorlds. She especially loved pictures, John Atkinson Grimshaw a favorite, and landscapes, and I’ve included one by Grimshaw, and another favorite of hers by Nell Blaine. We miss her on WWTTA

Nell Blaine (1926-96), Winter Trees from Studio

So ghost stories come from this kind of remembering, not that in my case at any rate I think we are going to reach anyone after death. Death is annihilation. But we can remember them. And then the ghost is picked up and becomes a vehicle for entertainment, instruction, artful absorption, a suspension of disbelief.

I often assigned ghost stories when I taught the gothic and found students were fascinated by this sub-genre (mode) of a subgenre (short fiction for magazines) — for ghost stories are very artful configurations.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Gothics and ghosts, romance and the supernatural: & Summerscale’s Suspicions of Mr Whicher

A still from a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”: Mary Boyne (Kate Harper) crossing an invisible threshold into the uncanny

Dear friends and readers,

I thought I’d tell about the list of books I’ve gotten up for two sections of English 201: Reading and Writing about Texts, a freshman and sophomore level literature course given where I teach. I’ve taught it before, and rather than try to create a whole new set of books with another theme, I’ve decided to refine what I was doing and revert back to two gothics courses I gave under the rubric 202: Texts and Contexts, some 8 (!) and more summers ago.

I have long loved the the gothic — really ever since I’ve known or recognized there was such a genre. The first one I read may have been Stoker’s Dracula, which I read with the front door to my parents’ apartment opened since both were at work until 5 o’clock. I didn’t fear people outside; it was the fantasy terrors in the closets that paralyzed me.

I’ve dedicated a section of my website to gothics, and the first time I was invited to invent not just a theme that fit into a pre-conceived course (like “Memory and Self at American University or American Literary Masterpieces), but a course from the get-go, I tried gothics. I’ve a subsection of my library dedicated to the genre and my fondness for Austen’s Northanger Abbey comes from my fondness for the genre. I’ve never tired of Bobbie Ann Mason’s The Girl Sleuth nor felt alienated from my reading of Judy Bolton, Nancy Drew and other books of this type discussed by Maureen Corrigan in her Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading.

**********************
So not just in the meantime but out of some need in my being, I’m going to do this (probably) far from transcendent genre again.

For the first time, my list is going to depend on online texts. Last time I did a 201, I did well with an online ghost story by Edith Wharton By picking and chosing from the plethora online, I can pick and chose what ghost or gothic stories I want. I just have to hope that they are not taken down before next January

For the students the list will look like this — they will see what they have to buy, and a pile of not too many, not too fat books.

Hill, Susan. The Woman in Black
Martin, Valerie. Mary Reilly
Charnas, Suzy McKee. The Vampire Tapestry
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Jodhi May as the unnamed governess in Nick Dear’s 1999 Turn of the Screw

I also remember last time how many students looked openly hostile and ill at the sight of a group of older (I had classic gothics) and newer books. So I’ve cut down my number and kept all bought books medium length to shortish. The only older book there is Austen’s Northanger Abbey — which is linguistically speaking and if not novella length, a book the size of Mary Reilly.

As I told my friend who works in the bookstore and who I’ve dealt with for about 15 years now when I order the books, if Mary Reilly is not gettable, substitute Jane Eyre and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; if no Vampire Tapestry, substitute Stoker’s Dracula; if no Under the Skin, substitute Frankenstein.

What I have here are modern re-renditions of the mostly 19th century archetypes of these classic books,whose most familiar image may be epitomized in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s A lady in a garden by moonlight (1882):

I know how the class as a group perked up when we got to the second half of the term last time and were doing all modern books.

But what we are actually going to do is much more, because we’ll have short stories and films. So it’ll go this way as a plan:

Two ghost stories (one possible vampire “Mr Jones”), with Hill’s having a particularly unnerving film adaptation Wharton’s “Afterward” a masterpiece:

Edith Wharton: “Afterward” (it’s online), perhaps “Mr Jones” (if I can find it online)
Susan Hill: Woman in black

Effective illustration to original edition of Woman in Black

Three powerful vampire tales, none misgynistic, two females and the third a genuinely inventive re-imagining of a brutal creature:

Marion Crawford: “For the Blood is the life” (extraordinary, a female vampire, online); and/or RLStevenson’s “Olalla” (ditto, more subtle)
Suzy McKee Charnas: The Vampire Tapestry

Cuny, medieval unicorn and lady tapestry (one chapter of Charnas’s novel is called “The Unicorn Tapestry”)

Historical romances novels, Mary Reilly, a rewrite of Jekyll and Hyde from the vulnerable woman servant’s point of view remains ultimately a werewolf tale; the Holmes story is about wife abuse

Martin, Valerie Mary Reilly
Sherlock Holmes: “Adventures of Abbey Grange” (online)
Kate Summerscale — The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Uncategorizable gems which will enable me to explore why gothic fantasy gives us deep insight into our troubled lives, needs, desires, really creepy, blighted sinister stuff:

Dickens’s “Signalman” (just extraordinary, online)
James, M. R. “The Stalls of Barchester” Cathedral” (chilling, awakens atavistic beliefs, ditto, online, this James an important master for modern ghost stories)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Illustration for edition of M. R. James’s ghost stories

Science fiction horror gothic, serious allegory in Orwellian tradition. also connects to fear of body, Frankenstein tradition of breaking deep taboos:

Faber, Michel. Under the Skin

Analysis, parody, and moves into realism: sexuality, class, war

Stevenson’s “Chapter of Dreams” (online about dream world from which gothic came for him)
Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey
McEwan, Ian. Atonement (alludes to and rewrites the former as well as Richardson’s Clarissa)

The fantasy never permitted to happen, 2008 Frears and Hampton’s Atonement (the lovers together and free)

Movies: a whole bunch; will or could include

From the Shades of Darkness series, Afterward;
A much admired unnerving Woman in Black (BBC, 1992),
From Return of Sherlock Holmes series, Jeremy Brett’s brilliance in Abbey Grange, Frear and Hampton’s Mary Reilly and Atonement;
Andrew Davies’ Signalman;
One of the two Turn of the Screws
(1999 by Nick Dear with Jodhi May, 2009 by Sandy Welch, with Dan Steevens)

Perhaps too: a piece or so from Davies’s Northanger Abbey;
One part from mini-series of the terrifying profound gothic, The Dark Angel (with Peter O’Toole)

I considered Michael Cox’s said-to-be-brilliant The Meaning of Night, but as I’ve discovered it’s maybe over 800 pages, it’s out of the question as too long. But I did order and will see if I can find time to read it because it looks brilliant and effective.

I’m not entirely satisfied with my list even as a dumbed down version of what I would prefer to do (say the 19th century originals or a course in political and realistic great books).

I wish I had a good book about gothic I could assign. I hoped to use Summerscale’s book but have discovered it’s not first rate (which I do think all my choices are, even if easy or not transcendent masterpieces) so even if I carry on with it, it cannot function in the way I partly hoped.

**********************
As usual, the prize (Samuel Johnson no less) is a way of selling Summerscale’s book. The blurbs absurdly overpraise and mischaracterize it too. It’s not riveting and not a horror, and not a recreation of Wilkie Collins (whatever is meant by that). Rather it’s a book which self-reflexively suggests what we find so fascinating in these mystery detective stories. Summerscale is able to recreate the Victorian world expertly and fully and includes (very rare in Victorian books) all the levels of people from their own points of view (so it reads like a vivid historical Victorian novel) and she often relates Dickens and other detectives (the inimitable Chief Inspector Bucket for example) to Mr Whicher.

Alun Armstrong as Chief Inspector Bucket from Andrew Davies’s 2005 film adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House

I’m not finding the book a disappointment because it’s not a mystery, but then I didn’t expect the blurbs on the back told me anything for real about the book. Nor do I like mysteries very much — except when they genuinely unnerving (like Susan Hill’s The Various Haunts of Men for me). When I was young, I would be startled and think the writer of the blurb misunderstood, or maybe they didn’t read the book. It may be that they often don’t, but nowadays I think they simply lie and say what they think might allure the niche audience the book is aimed at or might please the publisher or the friend who has asked them to write said blurb.

It’s not written as a mystery (however it was marketed); it’s as much literary and social criticism as it is about a real life murder. From the outset she aligns Mr Whicher with detectives in Victorian fiction, and suggests she is unearthing the Victorian milieu usually hidden from us or not sufficiently (or at all when it comes to the lower classes and their life) for us. It’s pretty clear by one-third the way through that Constance, the stepdaughter from Mr Kent’s first marriage, is the major suspect. The victim is a child, young boy in a cradle still, by his second wife.

Not that the book doesn’t have flaws and when I think of these I am dismayed to realize how I dumb down my courses to fit the average student (thus Bronte’s teacher’s monologue seems more a propos as days go back). First here and again she brings out semi-lurid statements about other murders — probably meant to entertain me. Her book can be used for reactionary behavior — building prisons, making harsh sentences to protect themselves they may think. She goes far too quickly over the seething cauldron this murder turned on.

It’s a Governess story. The second wife of Mr Kent was the governess in the first household. The first wife after a couple of pregnancies and living with this man went into an intense depression, and nonetheless he carried on impregnating her. Four infants therefore died — apparently of total neglect. He hires a governess and the children start to survive. Finally the poor wife dies, and he remarries quickly. Who? The governess. And she proceeds to be endlessly pregnant (for those who have the text, see pp. 70-73). Summerscale tells this but does not bring out morally what this is all about. The girl who confessed to the murder of the boy is a first wife’s daughter living upstairs in servants’s quarters. There is evidence the Mr Kent is having a casual affair with another servant. Shades of Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, no? (as seen in the 2009 film). This servant Sarah Gough, did not seek the boy when missing and it was she who called the boy a snitch.

What did he snitch I wonder.

It’s a middle brow book as she is careful not to go directly and fully into the taboo areas, and will have broad appeal. I’ll lay a bet it may be a favorite with some of my students — those not given to move into levels of fantasy. I’ve students I can use this text with to show the realistic origins of the gothic. I’m thinking maybe I should have another text on depression, say Styron’s Darkness Visible, only I worry yet further students will dismiss the gothic as the product of “whiners” and certainly not directly connected to them. Were I bold I’d use Kathryn Hughes’s Victorian Governess, only the gothic has far more sources in the human abyss than what governesses knew in Victorian England.

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) Silence (1799-1800)

I can switch my books and sometimes do, but not that often for then I confuse the bookstore and overburden my good friend there.

So if anyone reads this, can you suggest a book about the gothic (literary critical on the psychology and metaphysics of the genre) which is genuinely readable. I know of Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares which shows the genre to be a popular Kafkaesque genre for the 20th century, and Anne Williams’s Poetics of the Gothic (also Julia Briggs, Night Visitors, Coral Ann Howells, Mystery, Misery and Feeling, which is too focused on the 18th century (especially Ann Radcliffe, whom I love but do not dare to assign), on male and female gothic, brilliant. The first analyses books we won’t read and the second is too long.

**********************
I’m a little nervous about being so dependent on the Net, but the alternative is to order a specific anthology. That would lock me into many stories I don’t want to do and force me to cut some of the books I do want to do.

And the list automatically omits stuff I regret not doing (the classic older books), downright hated or seen as religious testimony (Oliphant’s Beleaguered City!), maybe a repeat that is finally misogynistic no matter how effective or exuded what I thought bad vibes from audience — attitudes (many vampire shorter tales).

Also omitted because I’ve found they are “defined” as woman’s books automatically and impossible almost to get through to the boys and the girls misread the last two badly: Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, and DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Jane Eyre a real loss here.

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) Evening (most of his work destroyed during WW2)

Ellen

Read Full Post »